This may seem like a weird question but I wonder how much it is worth? Presumably it's very expensive and precise equipment. I wonder if it's protected from gunfire in transit.
> gunfire in transit
Not just gunfire, they need to protect it from
- Climate Activists, blocking road and sabotaging the instrument, like they destroy old paintings at museums and art galleries to bring awareness via headlines [1]
- Foreign Adversary Intentionally Sabotaging Equipment to prevent America from leading in Semiconductor ( Had happened to India’s SCL silicon lab when they were catching up with market in 1980s ) [2]
- And ofcourse Gun Slingers too
[1](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/famou...)
Saying they "destroyed" any paintings is plain wrong, you've either not read past the headline or you're deliberately trying to make climate protesters look bad.
While I'm aware of many art/museum related climate protests, I haven't heard of a single one that damaged any art - all of them, like the example you linked to, the protestors chose targets where they could avoid doing any real harm. In the story you linked they threw paint over a glass case that protects the painting, not over the painting itself.
So it definitely wouldn't surprise me if climate protestors decided to delay the trip by temporarily blocking a road, but it would be extremely surprising if they did anything worse than splashing paint on something that does no harm other than needing a cleaning crew to get it off.
But your link isn't about climate protestors at all, and it's barely even about art - the painting those people targeted wasn't picked for being a well known and well liked picture, but because of the politics 100 years ago of the person in the painting.
Quite a different situation, and entirely different reason for protest.
I would guess that it isn't. My assumption (without any data backing this up) is that making a specific, super rugged transport container would cost more (along with the additional logistics of it) than the insurance on it.
It's not like something like that has never happened before: https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/santa-barbara-county-ma...
The US largely doesn't take internal Christian terror seriously.
And we certainly don't take rural whites acting recklessly with guns to be anything but the free expression of inalienable rights.
Quite a few folks like shooting stuff and have very poor judgement.
The kinetic energy of a 415000 kg object going 4.5 m/s is about equivalent to a 2000 kg object going 65 m/s = 145 mph.
I'm way less concerned about this thing hitting something moving at 10mph than I am someone else driving their thing into this bigger thing. It would have to be a massive thing to budge it.
As soon as they turn onto some smaller road they're going to run into power lines. If it's so expensive for Intel/Ohio DOT to move it, it's not gonna be any easier or cheaper for a thief.
This is like, what if someone stole the copper wiring from the white house
Fun to think about though. Fun weird question.
And using your white house example, while I'm sure people stealing copper cabling from it isn't considered a high risk, the possibility of people using guns to shoot at the white house certainly is something they take quite seriously!